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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 782.42166092
EAN num: 9780946719792
ISBN number: 0946719799
Label: SAF Publishing Ltd
Manufacturer: SAF Publishing Ltd
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: May 01, 2005
Publishing house: SAF Publishing Ltd
Sale Popularity Level: 280266
Studio: SAF Publishing Ltd
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Frank Zappa always did it differently, and here his fans do too. With delegates from Paris, Rome, Leipzig and Vauxhall, this parodic conference included papers called 'Arf': Canine Continuity in the Output Macrostructure' and 'The Mental Hygiene Dilemma.' Zen Buddhism, Frankfurt school Marxism, Philip K. Dick and the Zappologically Deranged are used to denounce Madonna, postmodernism, hippies and everything you hold dear. Priceless.
Ben Watson, music journalist and longstanding contributor to The Wire, Hi-Fi News and Signal To Noise, is well-known for his deviant and polemical music criticism and is an acknowledged expert on Frank Zappa.
Esther Leslie is a reader in humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London.
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Rated by buyers 
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Yeah, I'm a big enough Zappa nerd to have purchased this book. And yeah, I read it cover to cover, the endnotes and appendix, even the index. And I highlighted parts, too. But over and over, the single word that kept popping into my head, as I read on seemingly endlessly of fellow Zappa fans' deepest love for his work and its relationship to everything else crucial in the world, was "wanking."
I mean, I love Frank Zappa's music and legacy as much as the subsequent guy. No, I love it more than the subsequent guy, but I also realize that there is a spot where his work and his music and all of his statements, no matter how profound and underappreciated, end. Verily, Frank Zappa was a lot more than an avant garde rocker, more than a neo-classical genius. He was an activist, seer, comic, satirist and even public spokesman for American dental health, but I confess readily there's a point at which meaningful application of Zappa's words and music stops. But the folks here refuse to surrender to this weakness.
It's like the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, or Proust's In Search of Lost Time; if you get deeply enough into it, you can have it mean absolutely anything you want. It doesn't matter if you are into Meso-American pottery sherds, Japanese pearl-diving or mixed-martial arts; if you're deep enough into the catalog of Frank Zappa, you can apply it to absolutely anything that flies your flag.
And that's what we've got here. It's a collection of 14 essays by Zappa-dedicated folks into a staggering array of art, culture, social science and sociology, cultural anthropology, etc., and they apply Zappa to every single thing that turns them on. It's a deep homage to Zappa, of course, but almost all of it is a stretch, with some of the offerings being ridiculously tenuous.
The essays originate from a one-day "conference" held at the Theatro Technis on Crowndale Road, Somers Town, London on 16 January 2004, a Zappa nerd-in with 70-odd attendees. They presented papers and blathered on to each other and themselves about what they love and how it relates to Zappa, and now it's preserved for all time in this book.
Putting it together as co-editor is Ben Watson, the self-proclaimed be-all/end-all of universal esoteric Zappa interpretation. I said it in my review of Frank Zappa: The Complete Guide to His Music that Watson comes across as the worst kind of über-fan, the guy who knows absolutely everything there is to know, and who savages anyone who differs from his points of view and interpretation. He's back to that here. The guy knows volumes, clearly, about Zappa and a zillion other things, but he can't be content with his knowledge and supremacy. He has to lash out at those who disagree with him, and does so as early as page 6 where he calls those who oppose him "anti-intellectuals." He again starts out referring to himself in the third person, but soon enough it's "I" and "me," with multiple retellings of his visit to FZ's home, his opportunity to read to FZ from his magnum opus, etc. There's even an endnote to the introduction where he notes that Gail Zappa has indulged in a hurtful "Stalinist rewrite of history," and another where he--as the Editor--says "F**k you" directly to an essayist for a minor critique of his (Watson's) work. The endnotes are packed with his pathological snobbery and condescension. This bombastic ego put a bitter taste in my mouth from the beginning, which remained for the duration of the book.
The book opens with Watson's ragingly pompous, overwrought essay justifying the "conference" and the book, constructing an entirely new field of study, "esemplastic Zappology," a discipline beyond fan worship, beyond music journalism, beyond consumption and commercialism, as a way of "understanding Zappa's scepto-materialist monism." This field of study, then, is just why Academy Zappa has been founded.
There are essays on identity thinking in "The Spider of Destiny," mental hygiene, a possible cryptic Peter Frampton homage to FZ, Zappa and Easy Rider, Trout Mask Replica, market-researched anaclitic-affect repertoires, the power of "random pitches," the secret meaning of "arf," the poverty of the individual spirit, etc. And yes, all of this in some way relates to Zappa. This book is packed with just about everything you can imagine, most of it dense post-doctoral, self-important intellectual yammering about Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann, with macrostructure, Bob Dylan, Chinese feces, the poodle, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Marcel Duchamp, Josef Dietzgen, Herbert Marcuse, commodity culture, the logic of symbolic domination, chemistry's implicit understanding of the uselessness of the nobility, Georg Lukacs, TV's The Prisoner, John Cage (of course), Loch Ness, Freud, Max Horkheimer, Rimbaud, the Matrix trilogy, Heinrich Böll, Nietzsche, Goethe, Nick Mason, Kaiser rolls, Kant, Poe, Alban Berg, Godzilla, Philip K. Dick, ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
-
I have read the following books written by or about Frank Zappa:
1. THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK by Frank Zappa and Peter Occhioigrosso
2. MOTHER! THE FRANK ZAPPA STORY by Michael Gray
3. FRANK ZAPPA: THE NEGATIVE DIALECTICS OF POODLE PLAY by Ben Watson
4. THE ACADEMY ZAPPA: PROCEEDINGS OF ESEMPLASTIC ZAPPA edited by Ben Watson and Esther Leslie
5. ELECTRIC DON QUIXOTE: THE DEFINITIVE STORY OF FRANK ZAPPA by Neil Slaven
6. NECESSITY IS... THE EARLY YEARS OF FRANK ZAPPA AND THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION by Billy James
7. COSMIK DEBRIS: THE COLLECTIVE HISTORY AND IMPROVISATIONS OF FRANK ZAPPA by Greg Russo
8. NO COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL: THE SAGA OF FRANK ZAPPA by David Walley
9. FRANK ZAPPA: THE COMPLETE CUIDE TO HIS MUSIC by Ben Watcon
10. MY BROTHER WAS A MOTHER: AZAAPA FAMILY ALBUM by Patrice "Candy" Zappa
11. THEM OR US by Frank Zappa
12. UNDER THE SAME MOON by Suzannah Thana Harris
13. BEING FRANK: MY TIME WITH FRANK ZAPPA by Nigery Lennon
These titles are ranked in terms my perception of quality. THE ACADEMY ZAPPA: PROCEEDINGS OF ESEMPLASTIC ZAPPA is a collection of quasi-scholarly manuscripts presented at a quasi-academic conference on January 16, 2004 at Somers Town, London. Seventy-two people and two dogs were in attendance. Ironically, only one of the fourteen contributors originates from Frank's home country. I can only assume that the attendees represent the same ratio. Well, perhaps, that isn't ironic.
I have been an admirer Frank Zappa's work since 1964 when FREAK OUT! was released. Through reading THE ACADEMY ZAPPA: PROCEEDINGS OF ESEMPLASTIC ZAPPA, I found myself scratching my head in wonderment. Scattered throughout the chapters is an anti-intellectual theme. Yet, the authors commonly cite philosophers and abstract concepts that are frankly beyond the scope of a reader without a strong academic background. From my mind's eye, this volume is a real paradox.
Essentially, this body of work is an analysis and/or assessment of the psychological and sociological implications of Zappa's international influence on a wide range of topics. The editors note that these proceedings "do not promise to list everything" that Zappa has influenced, but "what Zappa's evident difference from regular mass and avantgarde music really is." In addition, a secondary plot emerges. Critical human themes found through the centuries are found in the works of Zappa. As a result, the contents of this monograph are not something that would interest anyone except those who are PROFOUNDLY devoted to the work of Frank Zappa. In many ways, reading this material is reminiscent of the works I confronted as a doctoral student. Hmmm, strange, that's how I reacted to Ben Watson's masterpiece, FRANK ZAPPA: THE NEGATIVE DIALECTIC OF POODLE PLAY. It made me think, but none the less the volume was a real hoot.
If you are up to really something that refines strange, get this book.
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